About Me

Known principally for his weekly political columns and his commentaries on radio and television, Chris Trotter has spent most of his adult life either engaging in or writing about politics. He was the founding editor of The New Zealand Political Review (1992-2005) and in 2007 authored No Left Turn, a political history of New Zealand. Living in Auckland with his wife and daughter, Chris describes himself as an “Old New Zealander” – i.e. someone who remembers what the country was like before Rogernomics. He has created this blog as an archive for his published work and an outlet for his more elegiac musings. It takes its name from Bowalley Road, which runs past the North Otago farm where he spent the first nine years of his life. Enjoy.

Bowalley Road Rules

The blogosphere tends to be a very noisy, and all-too-often a very abusive, place. I intend Bowalley Road to be a much quieter, and certainly a more respectful, place.So, if you wish your comments to survive the moderation process, you will have to follow the Bowalley Road Rules.These are based on two very simple principles:Courtesy and Respect.Comments which are defamatory, vituperative, snide or hurtful will be removed, and the commentators responsible permanently banned.Anonymous comments will not be published. Real names are preferred. If this is not possible, however, commentators are asked to use a consistent pseudonym.Comments which are thoughtful, witty, creative and stimulating will be most welcome, becoming a permanent part of the Bowalley Road discourse.However, I do add this warning. If the blog seems in danger of being over-run by the usual far-Right suspects, I reserve the right to simply disable the Comments function, and will keep it that way until the perpetrators find somewhere more appropriate to vent their collective spleen.

Followers

Friday, 1 June 2012

Political Dementia - Or, Is Labour In Need Of Aged Care?

Political Decline: How sad it will be if New Zealand’s oldest political party is forced to end its days looking out at a world it is no longer able to change; weeping tears of silent rage as younger politicians, with the courage to look beyond tomorrow, get ready to inherit today.

FOR A FEW WEEKS, towards the end of 1973, aged just
seventeen, I worked as an orderly at Siverstream Hospital. Speaking frankly, a
few weeks was all I could stand. Officially, this public hospital catered for
“long-term care” patients. Unofficially, it was an old people’s home.

Many of Silverstream’s residents suffered from dementia.
Some were violent, while others drifted in and out of reality in the most
disconcerting fashion. The most difficult to deal with, however, were those who
remembered enough to know that they didn’t want to be there. Recalling how we
would apprehend these brave old souls as they tried to “escape” still gives me
pangs of guilt. The bathing, the feeding, the replacing of colostomy bags: it
was all hard and emotionally draining work; but the sight of those tears,
falling silently from eyes that saw a world their aged owners could never
re-join; that was heart-breaking.

There was, however, nothing heart-breaking about the pay.
Anyone working through Christmas could earn a week’s wages in less than 72
hours. Overtime, double-time, triple-time: back then the workman and workwoman
were worthy of their hire. Mind you, back then union membership was compulsory.
Back then we had a Labour Government worthy of the name. Back then, the
prediction that my job would one day be described as “modern day slavery” would
not have been believed.

Two years later, not so very far from Silverstream Hospital,
just a couple of miles up the Hutt Valley at Brentwood School, I cast my first
vote. I still remember how my hand hovered above the name of the Values
candidate. I had read the party’s splendid manifesto, Beyond Tomorrow, and my head told me that the policies enunciated
by Values were the only policies to take the future seriously. My heart,
however, recalled “Big Norm”, and I voted Labour.

Silverstream Hospital, built by the New Zealand government
for the repair and recuperation of American sailors during World War II (and
visited in 1943 by no less a personage that Eleanor Roosevelt) has long since
been decommissioned. In its place stands the very handsome Silverstream Retreat
– venue for the 2012 AGM of the Green Party.

The Greens are, of course, the direct political descendants
of those prescient men and women who, almost exactly 40 years ago, founded the
Values Party. Naturally, there will be celebration – and much reminiscing –
over Queen’s Birthday Weekend as Values veterans, like its founder, Tony Brunt,
and Jeanette Fitzsimons, the woman who helped birth its political offspring,
rub shoulders with the Green Party’s record crop of fourteen MPs. Also present
will be Claire Browning, there to launch Beyond
Today, her book on the movement Values began.

Writing in Tuesday’s Otago
Daily Times, political pundit, Colin James, argued that: “[T]he Greens don't have to win the centre. They can look more
oppositionist than Labour because they can occupy (to coin a word) a spot
nearer the periphery. This frustrates Labour, which must win votes from
National to win the Treasury benches and must sound reasonable while competing
with Greens for airspace.”

When Labour’s legacy was still
potent enough to win hearts and
minds, Mr James’ analysis may have been correct. In 2012, however, I’m not so
sure. When the 150,000 mostly female, mostly professional, voters that National
wooed away from Labour in 2008 and 2011, and whom they now seem so determined
to drive away, decide to go in search of an alternative, are they really going to
choose Labour? Does David Shearer really have the emotional heft of a Norman
Kirk? I don’t think so.

More and more Labour is beginning
to resemble those dementia patients at Silverstream Hospital. Some of Labour’s
caucus, like Trevor Mallard, are prone to violent episodes; others, like
Shane Jones, test the boundaries of political probity in the most disconcerting
fashion. The most pitiful to contemplate, however, are the likes of David
Cunliffe and Grant Robertson. They know there are alternatives out there, they
can see them, but their colleagues will insist on hauling them back to their beds.

How sad it will be if New Zealand’s oldest political party
is forced to end its days looking out at a world it is no longer able to change;
weeping tears of silent rage as younger politicians, with the courage to look
beyond tomorrow, get ready to inherit today.

This essay was originally published in The Otago Daily Times, The
Waikato Times, The Taranaki Daily News,
The Timaru Herald and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 1 June
2012.

5 comments:

It is the 800,000 voters who didn't vote that Labour must woo. Labour had an unelectable leader in Phil Goff and a front bench who didn't want Labour to win. They just wanted to wait and see Goff defeated. Actually Phil performed quite well and with the right support mmay have sneaked home! But David Cunliffe expected he would be the new leader. Sorry wrong David!

Shearer’s so busy strumming The Who’s songs outside the baby boomers’ window, in a dismal attempt to woo them over to Labour, that no agenda whatsoever has emerged. It’s such a cynical and pathetic grasp for mere power when entire generations are maturing without hope, or even financial independence. All we get are the usual flies hovering about a rotting body politic: research and development, technology, etc. Thoughts of social equity or radical considerations as to how we live and the sort of society we would wish to foster barely even feature as empty rhetorical flourishes. Baby boomers will take both Labour and National—cynical authoritarian parties, subservient to the finance sector –to the grave with them.

Forgive me for being obtuse, but are they ready to inherit anything? I'm not suggesting RN is, but I just wonder what proportion of the Greens voter base you think might be right-leaning liberals whose "little poppets" have been sending away envelopes to World Vision and Greenpeace for many years but whose political values more closely align with the Act Party?

Tim G. may dream up an image of the 'average' Green Party member as being an Act type at heart. Makes a change from being seen as stoned tree-huggers. Neither image fits the truth of the diversity of the GP membership. Judge the party by the courage of the members to adopt policies that will make a real difference. The baby boomers at the AGM looked like folk who are determined to live long enough to see real change in their lifetimes. The cryptic words are especially hard to read today, and my eyesight isn't what it was last century!

I don't necessarily think that Green party members are necessarily aligned with act's political thinking, but they are very middle-class on the whole. Not only that but they are antiscience. If they'd only give up on possum peppering they might stand some show of getting my vote.